Calastone Limited, the independent cross-border transaction network for the mutual funds industry, today announced that J.P. Morgan Asset Management, one of the UK’s leading fund providers and one of the early mutual fund provider firms to connect to Calastone, has extended its open architecture approach to make its UK funds more widely available to Calastone’s growing community of stock brokers, wealth managers, fund platforms, fund supermarkets and transfer agents using the Swift ISO 20022 messaging format.

In broadening their offering to the buy side firms connected to Calastone, J.P. Morgan Asset Management is able to offer its open architecture to UK funds irrespective of a Calastone participant’s preferred messaging protocol. Calastone enables providers to benefit from transaction automation by lowering their costs, providing greater order flow visibility and control. All participants enjoy straight-through-processing regardless of their size or technology capabilities and are able to track exceptions on a real-time basis, enabling them to react quickly and efficiently.

By linking up to Calastone, J.P. Morgan Asset Management has recognised the opportunities that ISO 20022 will provide to the global mutual fund industry and now has complete capability to receive the ISO 20022 message standards. At the heart of Calastone’s transaction network sits a universal message communication and ‘translation’ service. This converts any message format to ISO 20022 enabling participants to communicate and take advantage of the global standard today, even if a counterparty uses another messaging protocol or communication method.

Commenting on the agreement, Kevin Lee, Managing Director of Calastone said, “J.P. Morgan Asset Management was one of the first firms to connect to Calastone and we are delighted that it has seen the benefits and extended its connectivity even further to our fast growing mutual fund community. The rate at which firms are connecting to Calastone is testimony to the industry’s appreciation of the value of automation and straight through processing. We believe that connectivity to our ever expanding community of domestic distributors, wrap platforms, wealth managers, fund platforms, fund supermarkets and stock brokers, as well as our international counterparties, makes us a compelling place to transaction mutual funds.”

Dan Watkins, J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Head of European Operations added, “Since connecting to Calastone, we have been realising the cost and risk benefits of making our funds available via Calastone’s transaction network and are delighted to make our Funds available to Calastone’s wider community. Calastone’s ability to receive messages in multiple formats, and their ability to re-format these into the ISO20022 standard, significantly increases the range of distributors and investors that have straight through access to our Fund range. J.P. Morgan have adopted and implemented the IMA principles around STP, and very much encourage further embracing of these practices to improve security, operational efficiency and the overall service to intermediaries and clients.”